Splendour fit for a Queen

A new film has sparked renewed interest in Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI. Nigel Tisdall traces her footsteps through Paris and beyond.

Only at Versailles do we get a taste of Marie Antoinette, the style-setting icon ...

12:01AM BST 16 Oct 2006

If the world knows anything about Marie Antoinette, it's that she was happy for the peasants to eat cake. From next weekend, though, when a ravishingly costumed film inspired by her riches-to-rags life opens in cinemas across the UK, we are all going to be freshly acquainted with this independent-minded Austrian who became Queen of France at the age of 19 and subsequently went to the guillotine in the stormy heat of the French Revolution.

Directed by Sofia Coppola, the movie Marie Antoinette is a light, enjoyable feast of 18th-century excess featuring gorgeous châteaux, regal hunting scenes, lavish masked balls, outrageous cakes by the Parisian pâtisserie Ladurée and drooling shots of period shoes recreated by Manolo Blahnik. But what of the real Marie Antoinette? Where can we go to get a genuine sense of this arts-loving woman who at the age of 14 was dispatched from Vienna in a 57-carriage cortège to marry a hunting-obsessed Dauphin who was seemingly impotent, gauche and oblivious to life beyond the royal estates?

As it turns out, I started my quest at the wrong end. Paris, I imagined, would have some sights to bring home the grab-the-tissues climax of our heroine's story. While the Concièrgerie where the queen was imprisoned and tried in August 1793 still stands by the Seine looking suitably grim, the cells where she awaited death are today filled with naff dummies recreating nothing much. There is some justification for this, though, for after the queen's execution a young sculptor, Marie Grosholz, made a wax model of Marie Antoinette's head. She later became known as Madame Tussaud.

The best historic trails always throw up surprises. The Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine did its grisly work, is now a furious whirl of traffic, but we can still follow the route the tumbrels took with the bodies, passing through streets, such as the Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, that now glisten with high-fashion shops. The queen was initially buried in the Madeleine cemetery, which in 1826 was turned into a bizarre royalist monument known as the Chapelle Expiatoire. The nearby Boulevard Haussmann may be a mass of shoppers and office-workers, but hidden away in place Louis XVI is an enormous, eerie and sobering memorial to 133 Parisians who died in a rocket accident during celebrations for the queen's marriage, 600 Swiss Guards murdered when the mob attacked the Tuileries Palace, and more than 500 victims of the guillotine.

Inside the chapel stand lonely, laudatory statues of the two monarchs, with Marie Antoinette looking anguished and, it has to be said, showing a lot of neck.

Since 1815, the royal couple's remains have laid at the Basilique de St-Denis, which is worth the long Métro ride north not because there is a lot to see – just two black slabs in a crypt that are the antithesis of the flowery, feminine extravagance that made her name – but for the basilica itself. A prototype Gothic cathedral, it boasts an ambulatory that is a frenzy of funereal statues honouring almost every king and queen of France since 996, squashed together in a VIP church in a neighbourhood that is decidedly challenged.

Fortunately, there is more to Marie Antoinette's legacy than cold, commemorative marble – although some institutions seem reluctant to cash in on the global interest an American film is sparking in the last queen of France.

At the Château de Fontainebleau, where the royal household repaired every autumn to hunt, the Petit Appartements, where the queen's boudoir is decorated with gold, silver and exquisite mother-of-pearl furniture, has just closed for a year-long renovation. Likewise, Marie Antoinette's whimsical dairy at Rambouillet, a gift from the king in 1786 that was adorned with pastoral-themed china specially made at Sèvres, has been closed for months.

That leaves just one monumental sight: the Château de Versailles, where by contrast Marie Antoinette fans are eagerly welcomed with dedicated podcasts and souvenirs that include Sillage de la Reine, a rosy perfume made to 18th-century guidelines that is available in a limited edition Baccarat crystal flask for just 8,000 euros (£5,408).

Only in Versailles can we get a taste of Marie Antoinette's golden years in the late 1770s and 80s, when she blossomed into a style-setting icon amid a frivolous world of music, gambling, OTT frocks and madly towering hair-dos.

You won't be alone, but then this was a busy, crowded place during the ancien régime, and we can at least share Marie Antoinette's desire to escape its claustrophobic atmosphere. Join the main, horribly busy tour of the palace, and you can admire the stately chapel where the young couple were married before 3,000 guests, and the jewel-box Opera House where they attended balls and performances.

The hot-house world of court etiquette meant that dining, dressing and even giving birth was a public spectacle, and the Queen's bedchamber – where 19 French royals were born – is a lavish, girlie affair with gilded mirrors, floral fabrics and peacock feathers. Book the more exclusive guided tour of the Petits Appartements, her four private rooms right behind this, and you see the flip-side of royal life – the libraries, salons and small octagonal resting-room known as the Méridienne where she would have enjoyed what we now call downtime.

The most engaging memento of the queen, though, is the Domaine de Marie Antoinette, a canal-fringed park which re-opened to the public this summer in all its rich and bucolic glory. This is where the queen created a private world that provided succour, fun and fantasy for the last 15 years of her life. It began with Louis XVI's loving gift of the Petit Trianon in 1774, a pleasure house that immediately brings us closer to a woman whose tastes and passions linger on in delicate furniture commissioned from the celebrated cabinet-maker Jean Henri Reisener, rose-filled portraits by her favourite painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, and an intimate boudoir curiously equipped with moving mirrors over the windows to ensure absolute privacy at night.

Even more bewitching is the utterly sweet blue-and-gold theatre nearby where Marie Antoinette performed in plays before the king and close friends. Beyond this is a leafy Arcadia of English and French gardens punctuated with points of romance and escape – a Temple of Love, a belvedere and, most famously, the Hameau. This is a specially built re-creation of a Normandy farm complete with a lake and half-timbered buildings that included a dairy, thatched cottage, water-mill, dovecote and tower. Flowerbeds, workers, farmyard animals and faux cracks in the walls completed an idyll for which the queen adopted a costume change into simple white dresses with a large straw hat.

Now restored, the Hameau looks like something from a Disney theme park, which suggests that our taste for romantic, sanitised versions of nature and the past has simply become more egalitarian. It's also fitting that, just as Marie Antoinette came here to avoid the strains of court life, so visitors now retreat to its restful benches to escape the endless tour groups streaming through the main palace and gardens.

The queen was in this private domain on the afternoon of October 5, 1789 when news came that an angry mob was approaching from Paris. As her world started to unravel, it is said that Marie Antoinette chose to return to the château on foot – a walk we can all still make today, contemplating the fate of an alluring woman and mother of four who had the misfortune to be born in the right place at the wrong time.

Versailles

Versailles is 30 minutes from central Paris travelling by RER (line C). Château de Versailles (30 83 78 88; www.chateauversailles.fr) is open daily apart from the main Palace, which closes on Mondays. Domaine de Marie Antoinette, which includes the Petit Trianon, Théâtre and Hameau is open daily from 12pm until October 31. A one-day pass costs from €20/£13.50 including audioguides. Guided group tours of the Petits Appartements must be booked in advance.

There is a lot to see and enjoy, so consider staying overnight. Sofitel Château de Versailles (07 46 46; www.sofitel.com) is close to the station and park entrance with double rooms from £122, and there are plenty of good restaurants around place du Marché. For further information contact the Office de Tourisme de Versailles (039 24 88 88; www.versailles-tourisme.com).

Other locations

Although the Laiterie de la Reine at Rambouillet (www.rambouillet-tourisme.fr) and the Petits Appartements at Fontainebleau (www.musee-chateau-fontainebleau.fr) are closed, you can visit the royal château at Compiègne (44 38 47 00; www.musee-chateau-compiegne.fr) where Marie Antoinette first met the Dauphin and her salon des jeux has been restored. The town is a 40-minute train journey from Gare du Nord, and a special exhibition featuring over 70 related works of art, Louis XVI et Marie-Antoinette à Compiègne, runs October 25-29 January 29 2007 (closed Tuesday).

Further information

Walks through Marie Antoinette's Paris (Ravenhall Books, £13.99) is an excellent guide to sights in and around the capital associated with the queen, see www.marieantoinettesparis.com. Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette - the Journey (Phoenix, £8.99) is a lively biography. The film Marie Antoinette (www.sonypictures.com) is released on Friday.